The more I learn about politics in Latin America, the more my skin crawls. But it is what it is, and we have to start from somewhere. The vast majority of educated Latinos believe that poverty in their country is the result of a vast conspiracy by Americans and other Westerners (Jews, for example) to rip them off and leave them impoverished. I assume this is also the belief system of uneducated Latinos but I don't know any of those personally.
The class system makes them look down on entrepreneurs, so the typical entrepreneur that starts a small business in a Latin American country is Chinese or Korean. This is so common that there is a phrase for it, but my Spanish isn't good enough, it translates as "the Chinese on the corner."
My father's second wife's family owned a lot of land in Mexico and also Venezuela, but it was nationalized, because they were from the USA originally. In Latin America, they not only believe that wealth is a zero sum game, they prove it.
In fact, the Mexican land was nationalized only a few decades ago -- it was very nice, too bad. I'd never buy land in Mexico or start a business, you can't trust the government not to steal it. |
